It costs $34.50 for the Standard version. This covers one site. If you are getting BackWPUp, I would recommend purchasing the paid version.

A bonus with the paid version is it allows you to backup to Google Drive, bt I would purchase BackWPUp is for scheduled backups. In the paid version you get access to a wizard for scheduling backup jobs.

That being said, I don’t recommend BackWPUp.

It fails the ease of use test. We want a plugin that’s easy to backup and easy to restore.

BackWPUp doesn’t have a feature to restore a backup at the moment. They’re working on it but, at the moment, can’t offer this feature.

Vaultpress/ Jetpack

Vaultpress is more than just a backup plugin. It’s recently been rolled into one plugin with Jetpack to make it more of a security plugin.

The plugin claims to protect you from hackers, host failure, viruses, user error, malware and exploits.

It does all this by doing the following:

​Backups

​Site Migration

​Automated File Repair

​Restores

​File Scanning

Spam defense

This is all well and good, but we’re interested in how well it performs backups. So let’s have a look.

Vaultpress does automated daily backups and stores it for you with unlimited storage space. They keep these backups for 30 days.

So, at any point after the first thirty days, you’ll have a copy of a backup from each of the last 30 days. If anything goes wrong, you can choose which one to restore.

Thirty days is ok, but ideally you would want you backups to be stored for longer. It can realistically take more than 30 days to notice a site issue and at this point all of your stored backups are basically worthless.

However, with the professional plan ($19.99 per month), you can get an unlimited archive of backups. Then, all of your backups are stored on an ongoing basis.

The plugin also offers one-click automated restores. This makes it incredibly easy to return your site to the latest version if anything goes wrong.

An issue for me is having to rely on Vaultpress to store the backups. This is something I’d, personally, like to choose.

I’d trust Vaultpress with my backups and I’m sure they are perfectly safe but being able to store the backups in multiple locations is important to me.

In general, Vaultpress offer almost all of the features you could want plus more (the security stuff).

For me, the backup archive is important. I would want to get the professional plan for $19.99 per month.

Overall, I can see why Vaultpress is so popular but there are two minor issues for me. The first of those is relying upon Vaultpress to store the backup copies and the second is that $19.99 per month is expensive.

For me, if I was to pay this for a backup plugin, it would have to have everything and unfortunately Vaultpress just falls slightly short.

BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy is probably the most popular backup plugin for WordPress. In fact, it has been downloaded over 500,000 times.

With it being popular, you would assume that it ticks all of the boxes. Let’s find out!

A backup from BackupBuddy contains:

​Pages

​Widgets

​Theme Files

​Theme and Plugin Settings

WP Core Files

​Custom Post Types

Menus

Posts

Comments

Plugins

WP Settings

WP Database

Media Library Uploads

Categories and Tags

Images and Videos

But don’t worry, you don’t need to back all of these up if you don’t want to. When you setup the plugin you can choose what you want to be backed up and what you don’t. It’s up to you.

Building on that, you can set up the backups to run on a schedule. All you have to do is set it up and forget about it.

Once you’ve backed up your site, you’ve got the option of how you want to store it. You can download the backup, store it on BackupBuddy Stash (their own cloud platform),Amazon S3, Google Drive or Dropbox amongst others.

On top of that, BackupBuddy comes with an additional tool. ImportBuddy allows you to migrate or restore your site to a previous saved version easily within the WordPress backend.

There is a simple interface that allows you to choose which version you would like to restore and complete the entire process.

BackupBuddy starts from $80 per year. If you only have one site, the basic version is all you really need.

If you have more than one site, however, it’s only an extra $20 per year for the Freelancer package that gives you access up to 10 sites.

You only get 1GB of BackupBuddy Stash storage space with both of these packages but that is not really a problem if, like me, you’d prefer to store your backups yourself anyway.

All in all, for less than $10 per month, BackupBuddy is great value for money. It does everything i’m looking for in a backup plugin.

BlogVault

BlogVault is an intelligent plugin in that it uses an incremental backup system rather than backing up the entire site every time.

This means it backs up the entire site the first time it runs. After that, it only updates the existing backup with any changes that have been made.

The theory is it reduces the load on the server and allows you to backup even the largest of sites efficiently.

BlogVault stores all of the backups on their own servers. They’re also stored on Amazon S3 servers as a precaution.

Although I’d prefer control over where I can save my backups, it’s reassuring backups are saved in two separate, secure locations.

Interestingly, BlogVault perform also perform incremental restores.

Rather than removing the entire site and replacing it with the entire backup, they simply undo the changes that have been made since the last backup.

In order to check whether this restore has actually worked, they let you check in a test environment first so that you do not have to make any changes that do not work live.

Overall, BlogVault is a very interesting offering. It does almost everything you would want it to do and it does it intelligently. The developers have clearly thought the process through and the marketing team explain it well.

From $9 per month, it is not going to break the bank. BlogVault really is a serious contender.

How Do They Compare?

What One Should You Use?

BackupBuddy is popular for a reason, it does everything that you need it to do and it does it well. While it is not free, it is reasonably priced. There are almost no drawbacks as far as I can see.

With BlogVault, there are a lack of options for storage, you are constrained to storing your backups with them (although they store backups on both their own servers and Amazon S3). I would like more options but this isn’t a major issue.

BlogVault is in the same price range as BackupBuddy (less than $10 per month) and it’s intelligent in the way it backs up and restores your site.

For me, either of these options would work perfectly for a small or large site.

Hey, I'm Danny! I write full-time for Authority Hacker. I came from a background of more traditional marketing before I started work for a large affiliate marketing site a couple of years ago. Now I travel the world, write, market and watch sports!